A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
sedge
A sedge is a grass-like plant of wet ground with, in most species, a solid three-sided stem, leaves in three ranks up it, and small wind-pollinated flowers. It is not a grass. Grasses have round hollow stems with swollen joints and leaves in two ranks. Sedges dominate fen, bog, tundra, and riverbank, and there are several thousand species, many of them separated only on the detail of the fruit.
Etymology
The word is Old English and is related to a root meaning to cut, for the sharp leaf edges, which are serrated with silica and will open a hand run along them the wrong way. The old rhyme for telling the families apart is that sedges have edges, rushes are round, and grasses have joints all the way to the ground.
Notes
Sedges do a disproportionate share of the work in cold and wet places. Cottongrass, a.k.a. bog cotton, is a sedge, and so is papyrus, and so is most of what a reindeer eats in summer. Sedge-dominated fen was cut on a rotation for thatch and litter across northern Europe, and the habitat depends on that cutting continuing.